coming to the central question

The central question was not as difficult as one might think. I struggled with the idea of of my unabashed carnality - a term that I have stumbled upon and quite like. I have turned the compost of my sexual adventures until all the colour and shape has mulched down and run together and there is nothing left but the bland monochrome of sex and more sex. Perhaps you have yawned at the endless parade of cock, cunt, pubic hair, orgasm, vibrator, animal, vegetable, mineral and blah blah blah ad infinitum.

It's all about sex, I tell them. It is all about fucking. But of course it has never been about fucking. I sit in the bland room with the woman who is helping me to sift through my errant thoughts and I know that it is not about sex. Sex has never been particularly difficult. There is no conflict there. My fucking has been easy and indiscriminate and since monogamy set in there has been little to write home about.

So at the heart of it is the idea of home, the leaving of it, and the coming back.

Even this seems too much to reveal in such a public forum. More exposing than the endless chatter about masturbation and penetration. The clean and easy disrobing that I have become used to, and comfortable with.

I had a dream once and it stuck with me. I was crawling upstream along a river with barely enough water in it to drown a child. Still the trip was arduous. I dragged my body through a trickle of ice and at the end of it there was an orange glow. A telephone booth. I would reach it eventually, but first there was the slithering upstream on my belly, my frozen elbows cut and bleeding from the rocky river bed.

I knew that when I reached the telephone booth I would call home. I wondered if I had enough change for the call. I couldn't stop to check or I would loose ground, I just continued to creep upstream, one exhausting heave after another when perhaps I could have stood and taken the few steps across the riverbank without much trouble at all.

message

Maybe our friendship has now gone beyond the sex chatter, which is a shiny veneer, like the new Laminex the kitchen guy showed us. And maybe we have traveled beneath this and now we are in that impossible void underneath where my skin is peeled off and there is nothing at all inside.

All facade scraped clean.

And maybe now you will realise that I bore you as terribly as I bore myself.

My Brother

Sometimes I wish I had a brother, and of course there might have been a brother. I wonder if we would have overstepped the line, lying, twinned in our tangle of arms, a little question mark of hips and chests and knees tucked up and touching each other. I long for the damage that we might have done to each other. I long for the comfort.

Not having a brother, I can miss the potential complications that come with mismatched genitalia.

My sister and I did not have the kind of relationship where genitalia could be talked about. My sister and I were a tangle of cat arms and cat legs and when we hissed at each other bruises flared up on my pale skin like a bouquet.

If I found this twinned other, this male version of myself, I would want to fall into some kind of awkward romance, but I know that I would be more likely to find fault in the mirror image of myself.

For now, without the possibility of a brother looming in the distance, you will have to do. I make you a part of myself even if you are not. There are tell tale signs but I choose to ignore them.

You will disappoint me. This is what you say and it is true. I am disappointed from the outset because one day you will walk off into your life and one day I will find some other not-brother to replace you with and we will never come home to share Christmas or birthdays or graduation parties.

Still, for now there is the invention of all the transgressions we might have shared. And I find a little thrill in them and a sadness too for the way it might have been but was not.

word

When you took my word and used it, out there, for everyone to see I was elated. This one thing. This little moment, amplified. So how then would it be on the other side of this kind of attention. The oceanic swell of my words, turned endlessly in your direction. This is just how I am. I have seen it more times than I remember. My unconditional attention. My odd half-care, half-love. My outpouring is greeted by the roll of the eyes. I am tolerated. You are tolerant.

But I have picked you for the moment and I am a small dog with a fast jaw and I will not be shaken off easily.

Saying and Undoing

When all is said and done there is quite a stack of things piled up on the 'said' side of things and not so much 'done'.

Things have become reversed. There was a time when I said nothing and it was all about the body and the things that it might say in the absence of speech.

It is not as if I am completely inert. I am still prone to running into the ocean fully clothed. I will climb down to the river and get mud on my shoes. I have raced out on the kayack in the thick dark without a light. I ride and ride and ride some days just to clear my head. I am still in my body and in the world in a physical way, but I say 'I love' and 'I long' and 'I would like to' and it is all talk. A great big heap of talk because I will not follow through with my body as once I would. But I still fall in love. And when you write what you did, you make it difficult for me to maintain a discreet distance.

I love my ever-constant boyfriend with a passion that is unfathomable, therefore this gnawing love that cannot be named is piled up with the heap of things that are said and left undone.

Undone.

An appropriate word in the given circumstances.

for Nike

"I am going to Paris where I will be beautiful"

She is more beautiful in this moment than I have ever seen her. It is nothing to do with her strong cheekbones, her large intelligent eyes that are dark and unwavering. It is about a kind of composure that she carries with her. A stillness that strikes me as more beautiful than any physical feature. I had never imagined that I could be beautiful anywhere. Even Paris. I have always seen myself as gnomic. I am not the heroine of the tale. I am the comic side-kick who finds a kind of resolution, left with the love of a dog, or alone. The one who leaves us with a sweet smile, but not the character that moves us. Now, seeing her so beautiful, I wonder if perhaps I have misjudged myself.

Beauty is all about symmetry, they say. Some perfect form of balance, or perhaps something that is almost perfectly balanced, the symmetry thrown into stark relief by the introduction of some small imperfection.

My eye seems to slide off the things that others may consider beautiful. Symmetry does not capture my attention. I am more drawn to the person who feels misplaced. I am attracted to the loners, the overlooked, the undervalued. I like the look of side streets, alleys variously decorated with bright paint sprayed indiscriminately. I like my houses tumble down and my bookshelves a patchwork of spines at a lean.

Perhaps it should be no surprise to me then that I woke up one morning, maybe a week or two ago and found that I was beautiful. Not pretty. Not like the girls who turn heads and who earn free cocktails just by gracing others with their symmetry. I woke and did not need to look in a mirror to know that somehow I had overlooked the obvious.

I am my own tumbledown building. I am the joyful expanse of my own flesh with the marks of age and a life of pleasure worn proudly like any graffiti-strewn alley. I like my own taste, admire it even. No one I know has the kind of perfect match in film and art and literature. I like who I am. I am strangely surprised by this. I like what my body does when I am touching it. I like the skill with which I bring myself to orgasm. I like the way I orgasm, contained and yet abandoned to the pleasure of it. I like that I can find pleasure in the slightest disturbance of the air.

I like myself. How could this be? I barely recognise my relationship to myself. Gone is the stress and worry, my constant assessing and reassessing of my own behaviour. I try on clothes and face a mirror fearlessly for perhaps the first time in my life. I am short and large and odd looking. My face is not pretty and my body is certainly not something to be reproduced endlessly like a photograph of a model or a parade of catwalk beauties each one similar to the next. I am myself and I am beautiful. In my own very particular way. This self-like makes me uneasy, but I am fine with that as well. It is the kind of uneasiness that I can love.

It has been almost a week since I became beautiful and I wonder how long this feeling will remain.

Ending with Odilon Redon

I am not certain as to the ending of the story. The story begins sad and then moves through varying degrees of melancholy. It is like the absence of light after a particularly languid sunset, the day bleeding out incrementally, leaking brightness, replacing it with a gathering dark.

A story that is mostly grey needs some kind of uplifting end. That is the rule of contrast. This story that ends badly was barely worth the effort of reading.

There are a handful of days till the proclaimed completion date and I am still toying with possible endings. Some of them are quietly sad, some have the kind of hook that splits you open and spills you out like fish guts. Some of them are sudden and unexpected and inexplicable. All of them are a fade to black and a little white box with the words 'the end' written inside it. All of them close the lid and leave us with our going over of things as in that picture by Odilon Redon that I was going to write about but didn't.